Marketing Resources

The time taken to find software and services that will allow you to make progress online can be a real roadblock to your progress which is why I am happy to share the services and software that I use with you.

This list is a combination of free and paid, you have to balance the savings in money against the extra effort spent achieving results similar to the paid products. For the paid products I may receive a commission if you buy through the link, this however does not affect the selections I make for this resource list., they are all products I currently use.

Getting Started

I actually wrote an ebook about this and it still amazes me that so many marketers still make these basic mistakes, you can grab your copy here

123-Reg, Domain registration, as mentioned in the book I recommend you keep this service within your own country or legal system and for this reason I use 123-Reg, they now look after all of my domains and have been doing so for many years.

Hostgator, Hosting, this can be located anywhere in the world as you can control your website hosting from within your domain registrar should your hosting company start playing up. The important features here are to ensure you have unlimited disk space and bandwidth plus excellent support when you are experimenting with your sites, I have tried to break my sites many times but Hostgator support have always managed to undo the results of my ‘great ideas’.

Paypal, Payment Processor, it goes without saying that if you are running a business then getting paid should be a key activity to get right. I have used Paypal from my first day online, selling Dr Who screwdrivers on ebay and I have never had a problem with them.

Marketing

GetResponse, Autoresponder, Once you are online then you should focus on creating valuable content for others and sharing this with them. The easiest way to do this is via an email list and I have tried many of the services available. Eventually after several years I have settled with and am happy to be using GetResponse, a fully featured modern autoresponder that allows you to start for free.

Text Formatter Plus, Email Writing, I found that having to log in prior to creating email messages massively stifled my enthusiasm and passion for writing which is why I use Text Formatter Plus to create my email messages. Once they are written, they can copied into the autoresponder series with the correct formatting maintained for plain text messaging.

LiveWriter, Blog Post Writing, as a man I am easily distracted thus creating posts inside my blog was never going to be a good idea what with all of the comments to approve and little cosmetic tweaks to apply. Therefore to ensure I get the posts written I use LiveWriter to compose the posts whilst adding the images, tags and blog settings prior to uploading to my blog.

Inkscape, Image Creation, when it comes to free image editors, it would appear that your only option is GIMP which I have tried and hated due to its insane menu layout, thankfully there are alternatives and my favourite is Inkscape which offers a lot more than just simple image creativity. This is a vector graphics editor which simply means you can scale any image drawn to whatever size you require it without any loss of quality add this to the fact that it is a fully accomplished image editor then I totally recommend this to you.

Camtasia, Video Creation, I have been making videos online for nearly 2 years now and until recently I stuck faithfully with Sony Vegas Platinum Pro which is a great program for video editing and one I was really happy with. However I was intrigued as to why all the other marketers were raving about Camtasia which was after all only a screen capturing program, Jing did that and it was over $200 cheaper! The truth is that Camtasia offers far more than just screen capturing but the deciding factor for me was ultimately that it handles all the video and image formats far better than Sony could ever do whilst using fewer computing resources to do so. If you are serious about video marketing then their free trial will allow you make your mind up.